Name: How I Get Paid to Travel The World With Japanese Musicians
Uploaded: 2020-04-20T17:07:29.000Z
Duration: 14 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

So today's video is a story, a story of how I met two Japanese shamisen players called Kiki and

traveling the world together and a little bit about how this basically became my job. How it took me out of a

Corporate job that I'd worked for nearly a decade and into a brand new world of getting to travel and enjoy

Japanese music and make videos and you know, what? If I don't leave this hotel room right away, we're gonna be late

We're in Vancouver and while the weather is actually really nice right now it snowed this morning

It's weird to see the mix of cherry blossom petals and snow

The girls are actually doing like a tour of Vancouver right now

So we've had like performances, events, workshops pretty much

Every single day since we've got here and today's our last day

The streets are like empty and we're just about at the girls hotel

So, this is Hikari and this is Kanami and together. They're a Japanese shamisen duo called KiKi

And while right now these two are top level

Japanese shamisen players and we are touring the world together sharing their music. It wasn't always like this

So let me go back a little bit so I can tell you the story from the beginning

So the story actually starts back in about 2011. It was I believe January 2011

I had gone out to Meiji Shrine to check out the coming-of-age Day ceremony

which is one of my favorite ceremonies here in Japan and

Afterwards I went into Shibuya and for some reason all the streets were closed off for

Performances as I was walking along the street I ran into these two shamisen players. They were just playing on the street

But we didn't talk at that time, right (KiKi: no)

At the time all I had was like a little iPod touch

So I took a bit of a video of them didn't put it online

In fact, it wasn't until probably six months to a year later when I ran into them again at Yoyogi Park

That I actually recorded a proper video on a DSLR that I had just bought for the first time by the way

By that time I had actually just started my own shamisen training

And so I asked the girls if it was okay to put the video up on YouTube. They said (KiKi:Yes)

We rehearsed that and that was kind of the first time I ever really seriously put something up on YouTube

I named the YouTube channel shamisen in Tokyo

And I pretty much intended on putting up like every single piece of shamisen music from any player that I found around the city

but after a couple months of recording different players

the only pieces that I really felt were upload worthy were the ones from

Kiki so I kept recording them kept uploading them and then one day something really interesting happened.

A few years after all of that we ended up performing at the exact same event

Kiki was like the main act for that event and somehow, I still don't know how, I ended up playing before them

I have the good fortune to actually be learning from the Yoshida brothers and one of them

showed up to support me at the performance and sat like right in the front row and

So they came out and saw him and they were like wait, why is one of the Yoshida brothers here?

We had a chance to have some food some oden and drink and that was kind of the start of our friendship

So now shortly after this that I realized that very first video that I uploaded of them had hit over 10,000 views

So I invited them over for coffee so we could like celebrate

Then we made the very first ever like Kiki promo video on shamisen in Tokyo

So we just watched that video yesterday and the two girls were like, oh my god it's so embarrassing

And all of this gave birth to a project. I started to shoot pretty much

Single performance that Kiki would do in the hopes of someday making a documentary, but we also started a series

Called shamisen under the cherry blossoms

And it was started with the entire purpose of landing us future work

So we're, we're like literally like in the of a middle forest right now

There's like a pond over here, I don't I don't even know what this is

The under the cherry blossoms video came up because sakura season itself was right around the corner

and the first year we didn't actually do the video with the girls in kimono

we just had them in what's called fudangi, which is just their normal clothing and uh

There was an old man who just like walked through this frame in like the middle of the video

But we liked it so much that we just left it in the final version and then uploaded it

The next year we decided to do it again and it was around the third year that we decided to put the girls in kimono

Really, really give some impact to the video and while the shamisen under the cherry blossoms video series was

Popular it did take at least three years for them to start gaining any real traction

So in between these videos we would just travel the country together. we would go up to the shamisen taikai

basically just go all over the place and do performances and make music but but the girls have a performance up in like like

15-20 minutes. So I'm gonna let them get prepped for that and we'll talk about this a little more afterwards

So it kind of brings us back to where we were before talking about putting up content and making videos like the shamisen

I just introduced the girls to the green apple suckers, I don't know if you've ever had these but I love them.

So the more content we made and the more of the video started to spread out the more the job offer started to come in

But in this time I found myself kind of becoming like a like a producer or manager or something.

It was at the same time exciting and overwhelming and everything

But it was at this time that I made Kiki a promise and I promised them that I would

Now even at the time I was very aware of how bold of a promise it was that I would take them overseas

But considering that was part of the plan when I first started everything I had confidence that I'd be able to pull it off.

I knew who's just gonna take consistent work and above all else

Patience. Which by the way is something that a lot of people seem to really undervalue in the grand scheme of things

I probably could have squeezed it in a much shorter time

But all too often people will trade out the long-term win for some kind of short-term gain

And it's not worth the sacrifice. So I wanted to do this properly, which means I knew it was gonna take some time.

Just wow. So with all that being said it brings us a little closer to where we are now

Which is how we started getting overseas, but I'll tell you guys about that in a minute.

So around 2017 the offers started coming in but pretty much every offer would fall through right away